Best Fit
by jayjaybee
Summary: Set c. 1963. Patsy and Delia consider how things might have turned out differently. One shot.


Patsy leads the way up the stairs, pushing the door open at the top. The cold, drizzly night air is a shock to senses made woozy by alcohol and tobacco and the pleasure of being able to be, just be, without having to consciously police her words and her actions, and most of all, by the sheer delight of having Delia in her arms, on the dance floor, for the best part of the evening.

Delia follows her out of the door, close on her heels.

'Oh, it's raining.'

'It's hardly rain.'

'Still,' Delia says, and stops to look in her bag for her umbrella. While Delia's fiddling with the catch of the umbrella, Patsy steps to one side, so she's not blocking the doorway. She turns up the collar of her coat – there's a real bite to the cold drizzle – and turns away from the direction of the wind to light a cigarette.

As she does, she's reminded of another night like this. It had been perhaps six months after they'd found the club though the rain had been much heavier, and they'd both been quite a bit drunker that evening. They'd still been living at Nonnatus then, the pair of them, that terrible, wonderful year when Delia had been trying to persuade her mother that she was well enough to live in London, that year before they'd finally managed to move into their own flat together. Delia had been the one to find out about the club, having overheard something a patient had said one day on her ward and having then asked a few discreet questions. During those last fraught months at Nonnatus, The Gateways had been a vital pressure valve enabling them to survive, but it had also been a learning experience for them both, and they'd stumbled on the way.

That other rainy night, all that time ago, Patsy remembers standing here, in the lashing rain, not unlike the way they're standing now. Back then, foolishly, emboldened by (and probably drunker than usual because of) a new outfit that was familiar and yet unfamiliar at the same time, she'd done something uncharacteristic. She'd seen Delia fumble with her umbrella catch, and, without asking, she'd taken if from her and started to work the mechanism herself, only to provoke an almighty tirade and to find it snatched back out of her hand.

'No you bloody won't, Patience Mount,' Delia had said. 'You might look beyond words in that suit and tie, but you're not starting any of that pseudo-macho would-be gallantry with me. I'm perfectly capable of putting my own umbrella up, thank you very much.'

Delia had been right, of course. It had been a stupid idea of Patsy's, out of kilter with the shape their relationship had naturally assumed over the course of their years together. But it had been an idea borne of an attempt to work out how she fitted within this new society that they had discovered, a society that seemed to have its own, entrenched ways of doing things. After years of making her way with no precedents on which to model her behaviour, discovering a new world with its own set of conventions had thrown her slightly.

Over the last two years, though (and after that drunken but completely appropriate outburst from Delia) they had made their own space within this environment, a space that was uniquely theirs. They'd not become regulars at the club, as such, but they had managed to make it to Chelsea once every month or six weeks or so, if their shifts allowed. And if Patsy's misguided attempt at gallantry hadn't been repeated, the suit that was partly culpable for it had made multiple repeat appearances.

She's wearing it again this evening. She doesn't wear it every time they come to the club: usually she only risks it in autumn and winter, when the nights are dark early and its unmistakable cut can be disguised under her coat: however much their friends and neighbours and colleagues are used to seeing her wearing slacks, the suit is, very much, a statement and she's not sure it's a statement she is ready to make to the general public. But she likes the way it makes her feel, and she likes what wearing it does to Delia. The first time she'd tried it on, Delia had been rendered, more or less, speechless though a gleam had appeared in her eye that had set butterflies aflutter in Patsy's tummy; what had ensued had resulted in the pair of them having to make somewhat awkward and unconvincing explanations to Sister Mary Cynthia.

With her cigarette now lit, Patsy is turning back to Delia when something away down the street – thirty or forty yards away, on the opposite side – catches her eye. Another memory surfaces, a slightly embarrassing one she's long tried to forget about. That can't be the place, surely? She takes a step or two towards it. It is. She's sure of it.

'Done it!' she hears Delia say triumphantly, finally winning out over the umbrella, and then, realizing Patsy's moved away from her, 'Pats, what are you doing? That's not the way to the bus.'

'I just want to have a look at something. It'll only take a minute or two.'

There's time before their bus – it's a five minute walk to their stop, and the bus isn't due for another fifteen, so they won't miss it. Patsy's already a few steps away from Delia, but she stops and waits for her to catch up. She accepts the arm that's proffered, and ducks her head so they're both covered under the brolly. It's a relief to be out of the rain.

They've never walked down this part of the street before. Their bus stop is in the other direction, and whenever they've been here, they've had a specific destination in mind and little inclination to dawdle conspicuously on the street, which must be why she hadn't recognized the place before. The façade's the same – Patsy remembers the blue paint – but the sign over the door is different, and it's not a florist's any more.

Stepping out from under the umbrella, Patsy peers into the window, cupping her hand to shield her eyes from the glare of the street light. She can just about make out faint outlines in the dark. The layout seems to have changed: she remembers the counter being towards one side, abutting the window. Now it seems to be at the back.

'This was it,' she says, turning to Delia.

'This was what?'

'This is where I tried to get a job.'

'A shoe shop? You never told me you went for a job in a shoe shop, Pats.'

'No, this is where the florist's was. You remember when I – '

'Yes, I remember that. Here?'

'I'm sure. I'm absolutely certain.'

Delia peers in the window with more curiosity now. 'Well, they must have been so disappointed when you turned them down they threw up the flower business for that of shoe leather.'

'I didn't turn them down,' Patsy corrects her. 'They turned me down.'

'Serves them right, then, if they went out of business.'

Patsy turns round, looks from the shop back across the road to the club. 'You can see it from here. I bet you could see it from behind the shop counter too, or where the counter was. There's no way I wouldn't have found out about it,' Patsy says, a little wistfully. The different path she might have taken starts to take shape in front of her. 'We could've found the club years ago. That was what – nineteen fifty – seven? eight? We could've been dancing there for years.' Patsy stops, thinking of missed opportunities, of years spent sneaking around when freedom – of a sort – had been so close at hand.

'You could've,' Delia says quietly.

'What?'

'You could've,' she repeats. 'You, not we.'

Patsy blinks, uncomprehending.

Delia shakes her head. 'How could we have survived it, you all the way out here and me working god knows what shifts at the London? You'd've seen me once or twice a month at best, and we would have drifted apart.'

'No,' Patsy says, but Delia's a little drunk, and her vision of what might have been is unstoppable.

'I'd've been busy at work, and if you'd've gone in there on your own – because why wouldn't you, when it was so close, and you saw me so seldom, and you were young and beautiful and not dead-tired of an evening from hospital shifts – if you'd've gone in there on your own, you know what they're like, some of them. You know what happens. You might have gone in alone, but you wouldn't've come out on your own. Maybe the first time, or the second you would, but after weeks, months, with you here and me, in the London, up to my eyes in bedpans and with nothing but nursing to talk about those few brief hours we had together – you'd've got bored of me and found someone more fun.'

'No,' Patsy says. 'That wouldn't have happened.'

But there's something about what Delia has said that gives her chills. They'd found it challenging enough to adjust when Patsy had left the Nurses Home to move into Nonnatus, when they'd gone from seeing each other daily – if even only sometimes for a few snatched minutes here and there – to dates, once a week, with hardly any privacy to call their own. Delia's right, Patsy realizes: even if her florist alter-ego had worked regular hours, and had more time to call her own than she did as a nurse, living and working all this way up west would have made seeing each other almost impossible. Patsy supposes her florist alter-ego wouldn't have been keen to have gone to visit Delia at the Nurses home (both because it would have been too insistent a reminder of the failure of all her hopes and dreams about nursing, and because going back there to visit Delia would have prompted questions of the kind they'd been keen to avoid). And Delia had so little time off - odd evenings here, odd days there – that she knows she would have found it hard to ask her to spend chunks of that precious time on buses and tubes to come out here to see her. They would have grown apart. Of course they would have.

'There'd've been no Nonnatus either,' Delia says now.

'No, I suppose not,' Patsy agrees. The flash of what might have been, the future that could have been hers, has lost whatever gloss it temporarily had. Midwifery is more than a job to her: to borrow the language of the women who (even now, to her amazement) she spends so much time with, it's her vocation. It brings her so much pleasure, so much satisfaction, so much contentment. It fits her, in a way that working in a florist's never could.

The club, she thinks, looking back across the road towards it, is a place she feels comfortable, and having known about it for longer would have been nice. But she wouldn't trade that knowledge for the other things she has: it's with midwifery, with Delia, that she fits best.

Patsy shudders slightly: it's the effect of the wind and the rain, to a certain extent, but it's also the thought of what might have been. She tucks her arm tightly through Delia's, and they set off in the direction of the bus stop. 'Well, enough of that,' she says. 'Let's go home.'


End file.
